Buttress decided to follow her accessible, poppy, enjoyable album “Hard DadaPop” with one of the most difficult listens she’s ever created. Although she writes this album off as simply “what happens when I listen to too much Venetian Snares”, it still has the unmistakable “O’Kneel” stamp all over it. Sure, it’s mostly all in 7, sure, it’s 100% extreme digital breakcore, and, sure, it’s filled with stretched and glitched noise passages that would make Mr Funk shake his furry head, but it also incorporates enough elements of Billy Idol, Black Sabbath, Operator Please, and I Dream Of Genie that it could only be the work of B’O’K. More like an EP that remixes itself three times than an album.

With the tenth in the compop series “Classic Hits: Live 2007” being dedicated to live reinterpretations of many of her classic pieces (transformed through a CDJ and several guitar pedals), this return to the studio took Buttress to new realms entirely. Inspired and freshened, her ear turned once again to the multi-mash-up, and pushing the genre as far as it could go. One of her poppiest releases since “Hyperpop”, this album sees Bjork and Bowie hijacked into glitch-n-bass, Led Zeppelin and Young MC fused at the riff, and Enya coupling with Morbid Angel’s drummer, all glued together with The Knife’s “Heartbeats”, and ending with a long drifting live track from 2006.

After her triumphant “core” series was wrapped up with the invention of “corecore”, Buttress was determined to be the first to go beyond it. So, while others were still trying to come to terms with the concepts behind “corecore”, she created the mind-bending new genre “post-corecore”. Not only does this album apply the tools and strategies developed in the “core” trilogy to works by artists such as Yes, Rihanna, Madonna, and the B-52’s, but it again extends the “core” genre with the inclusion of heart-breaking MOR ballads, stretched noisescapes, drone-based live material, and her infamous Windows-cracking track that was used to close the documentary “Steal this Film II”. Interwebmegalink-approved.

The final in her “core” trilogy, “CoreCore” again revels in the grunting syncopation of breakcore, but mixes it with an altogether softer touch. As well as the classic Public-Enemy-meets-the-Seinfeld-theme opening track, O’Kneel incorporates several of her more psychedelic-drone live tracks (created with a CDJ and a buncha guitar pedals). Although, there’s still plenty of filthy breakcore (including the cookie-monster-metal-mashup “C is For Satan”), this final in the “core” trilogy sees her wrapping up the series with a focus on what breakcore can become, rather than what it already is.

Following on from the broken shitcore of Compop 6.66, Buttress gives us the second in her “core” trilogy; a meme-splicing dadaist culture-tweaking album that straddles both the worlds of breakcore and mashup, to create something truly unique. With several tracks blending together to create longer pieces (“aural meme-couplets” as she calls them), this album draws its sources from the likes of Skyhooks, the Pussycat Dolls, and Shakira. To accompany the frenetic and sometimes-painful breakcore tracks, she intersperses them with pure mash tracks like “Get One Thing Right” (where she simply places J-Lo and Amerie over each other), and ends with an insane live drone track, recorded live at Black Lotus’s “ArseCore”, 2006.

O’Kneel’s first deliberate foray into the ubiquitous “distorted-and-cut-up-amen-break” genre known as “breakcore”, this album sees her applying it to as many unlikely and inappropriate sources as possible: Radiohead, the Beatles, even Peter Allen. As well as trying to reinvent breakcore as a pop phenomenon, she simultaneously makes her beats filthier and more jarring, creating what she dubbed “shitcore”. Not only does this album cover the entire gamut of her shitcore techniques (a style she never fully manages to shake off on any of her albums to follow), but it contains the dancefloor-shaking pop sensation “No Bananas”, as well as four bonus live tracks from her megadistorted “MONO” recordings of 2004.

After her explorations into bastard pop (her previous two albums were “Bastard Pop” and “MegaBastard”), Buttress wanted to return to the minutely-sliced memetic Frankenstein-techniques she had honed so well on her second Compop release “MegaMegamix”, but with an ear more attuned to artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As she describes it, she “wanted to push bastard pop into the shape of drum-n-bass, or something”, using artists like Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, the Black Eyed Peas, and Kelis as source material. Both poppy and jarring, both revolutionary and sentimental, this may be her most iconic and unique recording to date.

Randolf Reimann is a sound artist and musician from Bangalow, Northern NSW. He started his musical journey as vocalist for the Sydney 80’s hardcore punk band Massappeal. Randolf is also the artistic director and facilitator of Tra La La Blip, a project which provides people with disabilities access to new musical technologies, opportunities to collaborate with other musicians & artists and opportunities to record & produce original compositions.

About the set: When I left Australia in October I purposely did not take any music with me, no mp3 player, no CDs, no iTunes library. So this set is made up of music that has come to me on this extended stay in the USA.

Thoughts Flash comprises two hallucinatory tracks from Wake Up and Listen’s unreleased debut album. Recorded in the late 1990s, the album featured a number of studio recordings, as well as edited excerpts from WUAL’s long-running radio show on 2MBS-FM. The technique of condensing extended radio improvisations into relatively short pieces, as on these two tracks, suggested a fruitful direction for the duo, however Bertram and O’Neill spent the following years focusing on other projects, with WUAL continuing primarily as a live act (their 2001 mini-album Mustard Keanu notwithstanding). WUAL’s recorded archives are nevertheless extensive, and it is likely that more material will be published on their website as well as on future Alias Frequencies releases.

These selections represent a sample of individual works, experiments and never-to-be finished pieces produced between 2005 and 2007. Some pieces mark the beginnings of failed projects or redundant tangents, whilst others came to be for unknown reasons. All compositions are intended for most appropriate use in managerial meeting rooms, excecutive boardrooms, vaults, darkness, at volume and with influence. It is advised that this composition be played in all work places both before and after work each day. This music is without genre and is Dark Corporate Techno, Dark Grinding Corporate Ambience, Dark Corporate Art Core and 21st Century All Family Punk. As such it is intended for consumption by all, and so it should be. Music for Everyone. If you listen, you’ll hear that Lucas Darklord is pleased that you are.